Today was all about clouds. Music stored in clouds. Imaginary girlfriends billowing about. I’m not certain the “cloud girlfriend” site isn’t a hoax, but I signed up to be a beta tester or something. The big news was the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. You take about 5 gigs of music – about 1,000 songs – and you upload them to Amazon, where they’ll be accessible via the Cloud Player from any computer or Android device. (It isn’t Apple friendly, so I haven’t been able to try it out.) If you want more storage space, then you pay. Otherwise, it’s free. Storing data is cheap. Moving it around the Internet is cheap. Think about streaming movies via Netflix. No DVDs. No stores. Amazon is trying to shift toward digital content. All the big players are. Both Google and Apple are expected to unveil cloud “lockers” for your music later this year. Amazon was first, but it may have jumped the gun because it hasn’t formalized licensing agreements with the major music labels. It will all be worked out eventually. Everything is shifting to the clouds. More

“THEN WHO WAS PHONE” is an example of a not-scary “creepypasta.” If you were scared, I apologize. If you have no idea what is going on, I’ll explain later. [Edit note: I forgot to mention that I think “THEN WHO WAS PHONE?” is absurdly hilarious. The schlocky story and the bad grammar and spelling fits with my twisted sense of humor.] I was reading about creepypasta on Know Your Meme, the encyclopedia website I wrote about in January that documents the universe of Internet memes. A website called Tubefilter, which I had never heard of before Monday, broke the news that Know Your Meme was being sold to the Cheezburger Network. Maybe this is where I start to lose you again. Cheezburger is the home of LOLcats, as in “I can haz cheezburger?” I wrote about the Cheezburger Network getting $30 million in venture funding in January. Some of that money was used to buy Know Your Meme. More

Color is the new photo-sharing app that allows you to share photos with friends and strangers, with a catch: They must be within 150 feet of you. I’ve tried to use it since it was released Wednesday. I say try because it is useless unless somebody else has the app and is nearby. I finally found somebody in Center City, Philadelphia, using the app. I was at an underground mall. He was in an office somewhere nearby. The photo he took was about an hour old – of his office, or somebody’s office. Whoa! I am not alone at being underwhelmed or just plain baffled by the app. It received so much criticism on its first day that its CEO, Bill Nguyen, told Mashable that the app would be getting a major update ASAP. So, it sucks, or people don’t understand how to use it – so what? It’s noteworthy because it launched with a $41 million investment. Again, so what? There is an ongoing debate about whether we are in another tech-industry bubble. One warning sign to look for is when investors continue to pour money into exhausted ideas. For example: photo sharing. Theoretically, Color can be interesting, but a massive amount of people need to be using it. And even then, it may only be interesting at events with lots of people. Until then, it has switched from becoming the target of frustration to becoming a joke about becoming the “dick pic” app. More

Google’s Transparency Report is an excellent way to find out what is happening to Internet activity around the world (except China). You select the country and then a Google service, such as search or YouTube, and then get a pretty good idea of whether the people in that country are able to access the Internet or not. If unencrypted searches drop to near zero, you know something is up – like in Libya, on Mar. 3 around 11:30 a.m. EST (my time). More

Ha! When was the last time you saw a Hannah Montana lyric quoted? Hardcore is how I roll.

WordPress.com announced on Wednesday that WordPress blogs can now be optimized for iPad viewing. It also was noted that there are more than 18 million WordPress blogs, an astounding leap from the 10.5 million just one year ago. So I’m one in 18 million. Woo! Glad to have so much company. I had read that blogging was dead. Actually, it has been declared dead several times in recent years, especially with the rise of Twitter and Facebook and mobile apps providing other outlets for people to express themselves. But just like a nut with a printing press, here I am with this blog. My only reservation has been whether I should have started it on Tumblr rather than here. So the stats on WordPress’ growth are encouraging.

I’ve already written about Twitter’s fifth anniversary and what it means in the big picture scheme of things. Today I’ll share a few fun and interesting things about Twitter. Lady Gaga is the Queen of Twitter with nearly 9 million followers. President Obama is 4th on the list with 7 million followers. I follow neither. Probably the most popular person on Twitter that I follow is Roger Ebert, who recently shared at the TED conference how Twitter and the Internet helped him reinvent his voice after cancer surgeries took away his ability to talk. Oh, wait. I just remembered. I follow Charlie Sheen. He has more than 3 million followers. I find his antics fascinating. I don’t think he’s having a break down or is mentally ill. He’s just amoral, or immoral, and lovin’ it. Enough of famous people. Here are some important tweets from people who are not famous, but what they are doing on Twitter is vitally important: More

When I got my first iPod – iPod! – Nano (okay, not the original iPod), I subscribed to Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Technology” podcast and to “Diggnation.” From the latter, I learned about Digg.com. I never got into it, but millions of others did. I did enjoy Digg founder Kevin Rose in the podcasts trying out beers and talking tech. It was cool. Then I had some changes in my life that eliminated much of my commute, and my podcast listening time. Last year, Digg made the news with a much reviled redesign, which turned into a boon for Reddit, which has now eclipsed Digg in relevance. On Thursday, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch noted that Rose was hardly using Digg himself anymore. Well, does mark Zuckerberg really use Facebook that much? I think he has bigger fish to fry than updating his FB status. But then it was reported Friday that Rose had resigned from Digg. More